


SBURBFAN947'S ANY% SBURB V1.1.82.5212 SINGLE-PLAYER SPEEDRUN NOTES

by endofunctor



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-24
Updated: 2012-04-24
Packaged: 2017-11-04 05:40:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/390379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endofunctor/pseuds/endofunctor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The summary notes for Sburbfan947's 1:06:20 Sburb speedrun. While the single-player mod was controversial at the time, the Sburb speedrunning community now considers the difficulty of coordinating a client and server to be more than is reasonable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	SBURBFAN947'S ANY% SBURB V1.1.82.5212 SINGLE-PLAYER SPEEDRUN NOTES

Pre-game note: Some people people think that Seer is the optimal choice for speedrunning. However, this is not accurate. The computation power necessary to use the Seer's prediction abilities causes significant amounts of latency; this false belief has persisted since this lag cannot be observed from within the universe without the most recent version of Arch4gent's FRAPS patch for Sburb, which introduces metauniversal indirection (and unfortunately only works on Intel CPUs). The optimal class is actually Prince due to the sheer damage it can put out even at low levels, but the class determining system hasn't been reverse-engineered yet.

 **00:10:30** : Part of the problem with the single-player patch is that Sburb tends to behave erratically if the 'client' can see its own screen. I mostly manage to avoid this, but there are still a few parts of my house that have really fucked-up geometry. I just use them as garbage disposals and try to ignore the artifacting and non-Euclidean geometry.

 **00:12:11:** While Sburb's retrocausality engine tries to ensure you prototype with death-related objects, its langauge parser doesn't seem to handle words with multiple meanings very well; here I can prototype my Slayer album just fine. This winds up accelerating the Archagent Betrayal sequence, but since I never actually complete that part of the game it doesn't matter.

 **00:20:01:** OK, I'm in the game proper. Note that I get the Time aspect; this is because I've lived my entire life in fear of my own death. Time is currently believed to be the best aspect for speedrunning for obvious reasons, so this works out. Unfortunately, I got Mage as my class, but there are still some decent low-level moves such as the LORENTZ SLICE.

 **00:22:34:** I've found my quest bed. The trick is getting to it without fighting all the enemies in the way; if I hit just the right enemies and get lucky spawn positions, I can basically use damage invulnerability and take damage to save time.

 **00:22:40:** Tripping over my own chair here isn't taking damage to save time, I'm just clumsy as hell.

 **00:25:23:** Here's where I force my ascenscion. The timing here on this is key. If you stab yourself too early, then you'll die before you hit your quest bed and so you'll get a game-over instead of an ascenscion. Too late, and you lose time. Some people think the god-tier cutscene takes more time than it saves, but the only way to get similar damage output is to use the Projectile-Blade Swap Trick, and I didn't have bladekind for this run.

 **00:32:17:** OK, this one is kind of tricky. If you die on your quest bed and then come back as your god-tier self, then die on your quest bed again, the game tries to ascend both of you to god tier by modifying your echeladder rank. But since you're already god-tier, it winds up overwriting the memory location that stores your grist totals; the end result is that, as you can see, I have *negative* build grist. This will come in handy later.

 **00:37:02:** This is a recently-discovered trick that not many people know about. Certain denizens, such as VULCAN, don't actually know your name. When they ask you, if you give them a long enough name they start spacing out and forgetting the choice they wanted you to make. So the next two minutes are me going "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" until he stops paying attention. Then you can just dash past them and grab their grist hoard, which I use to alchemize all my top-tier weapons. (I have to not grab any build grist or it'll reset my counter).

 **00:41:54:** This is what the negative build grist is for. Sburb stores grist counts as unsigned integers, meaning that it treats negative grist as very large positive grist. Therefore I can alchemize 256 different items and try to store them in my Null-terminated String Modus, causing a buffer overflow. The next 10 minutes are just inventory management to directly edit RAM; this is why imps pop in and out of existence, my health total overflows my vial (I got some on my carpet, and while that doesn't affect my run game abstractions are a pain to clean out), and I seem to teleport all around the Land of Triangles and Hexagons. The 'missing' frames at around 00:46:10 are because I momentarily landed in the Furthest Ring, and had to edit out the visage of the horrorterrors as they are damaging to non-Dersite onlookers. The remaining sburbtas.org admins consider this 'acceptable' editing, and hope that Silph92 recovers soon.

 **00:55:10:** Ok, starting the Black King fight. Due to the memory editing I did, I've technically beaten the game but it doesn't know it yet. So when the King summons meteors, nothing happens. That doesn't mean he can't kill me, of course. Fortunately I also gave myself PLANCK IN YOUR EYE, probably the best attack for low-level runs since it has a chance to blind.

 **01:03:17:** I almost got really unlucky here. I forgot that prototyping with Slayer gives the Black King an ANTHRAXENOCIDE attack, which does damage equal to its target's HP. Due to a bug in the English translation of Sburb, if a god-tier player is reduced to exactly 0 HP it's interpreted as 'just' dying, leading to a game over. Fortunately, I get criticaled and go into the negatives, letting me resurrect.

 **01:06:20:** Black King is down, and I can open the door and trigger the ending cutscene.

Hope you enjoyed my run! There are still a few places I think I could shave off a few seconds, but overall I'm pretty sure that we're close to optimal. I've heard that there are a couple people working out ways to TAS Sburb, but so far I haven't heard anybody figuring out a way to avoid the infinite loops that come from restoring a savestate that includes your own speedrunning software. 

By the way, I'm taking donations to help pay for my doctor bills. Taking damage to save time isn't exactly healthy.

\--Sburbfan947


End file.
